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Journalist to be retried on technicality for criticising army in 2002 magazine article

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(BIANET/IFEX) - The Supreme Court sentenced journalist Emin Karaca to five months in prison, then later to a fine of 900 YTL (approx. US$680), for criticising the army. Now he is to be retried.

Karaca wrote an article in the magazine "Yazin", which appears in Turkey and Europe, remembering the anniversary of the execution of three leftist militants, Deniz Gezmis, Yusuf Aslan and Hüseyin Inan.

In his article, printed in the April 2002 issue of the magazine, Karaca wrote about the execution of the three young men 30 years earlier. He accused the army of being involved in murders since the 1960s.

Karaca was tried under Article 301/2, for "insulting and deriding the armed forces". In the trial, which began in November 2002, Mehmet Emin Sert, the magazine's editor, was acquitted. Doðan Özgüden, the editor-in-chief, was not tried because he lives in Belgium.

Now, because of a procedural error (a missing signature), Karaca will be retried. The new trial is set to start on 20 June 2007, in a penal court in Istanbul.

At the time of the first trial, international press freedom group Reporters sans frontières wrote a letter to then minister of justice Aysel Celikel protesting against the case.

After already cracking down on freedom of information in recent years, President Erdoğan has taken advantage of the abortive coup d’état and the state of emergency in effect since 20 July to silence many more of his media critics, not only Gülen movement media and journalists but also, to a lesser extent, Kurdish, secularist and left-wing media.

Authorities prosecuted a number of prominent journalists on terrorism-related charges, including the editor in chief and the Ankara bureau chief of the Cumhuriyet daily, who were arrested in connection with the paper’s coverage of alleged weapons shipments to Syria by Turkish intelligence services.

The report is a frank assessment of the recent regime of online censorship and mass surveillance against a backdrop of longstanding, serious abuses of the judicial process and attacks on freedom of expression by Turkish authorities.

The Turkish authorities severely restricted the right to freedom of expression of journalists and writers during and after the Gezi Park protests in 2013, English PEN and PEN International said in their joint report.

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Satirical cartoons of political leaders are widely understood as a crucial form of social commentary around the world. In Turkey, however, they're yet another way the government criminalizes social criticism.

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